1. Field of the Invention
In the hairdressing art portion of beauty parlors it is often desired to cause the hair to exhibit two colors, a process called by several names such as tinting, frosting, or highlighting. This invention comprises a novel and useful cap to be used by the hairdresser to expedite the process of coloring localized strands or bunches of hair in an orderly pattern so as to enhance the overall effect on an observer of hair which has been subjected to localized re-coloring.
2. Description of Prior Art
There are two caps currently used for what hairdressers call highlighting or frosting, to assist the hairdresser in producing the desired effect.
One product is a full cap to be tightly fitted over all the area from which hair grows. Holes are provided essentially all over the surface of the cap, which is placed over combed-back hair. The strands to be colored are drawn through the holes with a tiny hook inserted in each hole, capturing a tiny lock of hair which is then pulled through the cap and becomes the strand to be colored. This type of cap allows the treating chemical to be applied at the same time, approximately, to all the strands to be colored--avoiding both undercoloring and excessive exposure to the chemical which can damage the hair. It's principal disadvantage is that the strands pulled through the cap need not extend to their roots. Depending on the time, patience and skill of the hairdresser's blind manipulation of the tiny hook, the hair pulled through can come from any depth and/or a location on the scalp dependent on the parallelism of individual hairs generated by the pre-combing and, in theory, retained during installation of the cap. Hairs from an upper layer might originate an inch or more distant from the hole, or a smaller distance sideways. Moreover, backsliding the length of a strand of hair against the combed direction of adjacent hairs may disturb the orderliness of hair "downstream" from the hole being worked on. The result in any case is some discomfort to the customer, more discomfort and disorderliness than my invention provides.
Another device for doing the same localized strand-coloring is a stack of special-purpose self-adhesive wraps in the form of sheets and a "helper," a rectangular flat made of plastic on which one sheet is to be laid for each line of strands to be colored. A substantially horizontal line is created in the hair mass, with the helper's narrow end close to the scalp and the hair above temporarily directed upward except for the strands to be treated, which lie in the long direction of the helper on which one sheet of the self-adhesive wrap lies. The chemical is applied, the wrap doubled over enclosing chemical and hair strands and sealed to itself, and the helper removed. The entire process is then repeated a fraction of an inch higher on the head, and again and again to cover the back and sides of the head. The duration of manipulation is a serious drawback to this method, since exposure of hair strands to chemical varies so much at various placed on the head. It is a slow process with considerable danger of overprocessing or undercoloring local regions. Damage to the hair, or variability of result over the head are the principal drawbacks to the use of wraps to color hair locally. My invention accomplishes the same end without such drawbacks, as the hair preparation time is divorced from the time span in which the hair is exposed to chemicals.